Never Saw it Coming by Linwood Barclay

Keisha Ceylon, makes a living by offering to help people when they most need it, by getting in touch with their dear departed or by touching a possession of a missing person to indicate a place they may be found at present. It is a gift, it is a service, but Dear Keisha does not open her mouth until she is paid. Keisha is not new to us, if we have read 'No Time for Goodbye' by Linwood Barclay, she offers to help the protagonist by using her gift to find her missing family, yes, for money. But Keisha is considered a Con-artist, but is she? Most times what Keisha does is listen to her clients. People need somebody to talk too and somebody to reassure them, Keisha does that, well, for money. She not only listens and reassures, but also connects with the dead, brings words of wisdom from beyond and gives hope to the hopeless.

Keisha scans news for potential clients and contacts the family of missing persons and offers to help them find them. Things go wrong for Keisha, when she is completely right. When her random guess hits spot-on, and the client feels that Keisha knows more than she need know. Keisha offered to see into the future of her clients, but never saw it coming, whatever was coming for her.

It is interesting how Linwood Barclay steers our feelings for the characters from one extreme to the other. I didn't expect myself to be rooting for whom I was rooting in the end. This is a short novel with twists and turns that could be read in a single sitting. I understand from the author's website that he had reworked his earlier novella into a novel. I did not read the earlier novella, The Clouded Vision, so I can't really say how much more he had added to the story. I may have been disappointed with this book, if I had read the earlier one, as I don't want to read the same book with a different name. But then I haven't read the earlier one, and in this book I never saw it coming. I enjoyed this little thriller with lots of surprises.


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My review of Trust your Eyes by Linwood Barclay that I read earlier this year.

My Post for Crime Fiction Alphabet

Trust your Eyes by Linwood Barclay

Is it possible to travel nook and corner of every single street in all the cities of the world? Why not? He is on such a mission not just for fun but to save the world. As we are relying more and more on GPS and online maps, paper maps are slowly disappearing. In the event of a major internet crash, and if there is an attack on major cities, who would tell the directions. Who has a photographic memory for this Herculean task? Who will save the day if there was an alien attack? Right, right! This is not a science fiction story. If you have read Linwood Barclay's book before, you would know what kind of book this is. If you haven't, this is the kind of story where an ordinary man gets involved in well um thrilling events.

Ray Kilbride, a cartoonist, is back home for his father's funeral. His father died in an accident involving the lawn mower in the garden. Ray is trying to settle his father's estate and decide on his younger brother Thomas, who lives confined in his rooms brooding over the Whril360 program (virtual map) virtually traveling the nook and corner of major cities in the world, trying to save the world in case of a major attack. Thomas is schizophrenic and completely dependent on his father and is obsessed with maps and believes that he is working for CIA. Traveling the roads of the New York, Thomas spots something that looks like the image of somebody being murdered. Thomas makes Ray look into the matter, travel to New York and see if somebody is murdered in that place. Ray visits New York on work but also to assure his brother that the image he saw was not a murder but something else, visits the place setting into motion things to come. There are two mysteries in this novel. One about the image Thomas views in his virtual journey and other is a nagging feeling that there is something wrong with Ray's father's death. Was he killed and why?

The first thing I did while reading the book is google whirl360. Go on google it. It leads to the author's website. There is some excitement about visiting virtually the places you have lived, your old school, or the places you might be visiting or hoping to live, isn't it? Linwood Barclay toys with this idea and creates a thriller. I quite liked the idea of viewing a murder on a virtual map site and I liked the execution of it too. Is it plausible? Why not? So what do you do, if you spot something like that. Would anybody believe you, especially if the world knows that you are schizophrenic? Even if you are not, if the image is blurry, who is going to believe you and there is the question of when the murder took place. The murder may have taken place anytime, it just took place when the vehicle with the camera passed that particular road, which could be as far back as two or three years or as late as yesterday. We get two narrations, one of Ray's, the other about the murder that took place about an athletic assassin. I liked the twists and turns and surprises. Trust your Eyes you are on a thrilling ride.